Soul Meets Body
by Courtney Belle
Summary: SEQUEL TO BETWEEN THE SHADOW AND THE SOUL. The reappearance of the long-dormant Gossip Girl threatens Elle Waldorf's claim to the Constance Billard throne. Will she follow in her mother's footsteps in more ways than one?


**Author's note:** STOP! DROP! ROLL! Or, just stop. The other two things might be messy/destructive/inconvenient considering your current situation. Before you read this, make sure you've read _Between the Shadow and the Soul_, 'cause, y'know...it's a sequel, and it won't make very much sense without the first. I mean, it might, but you should still read the first just in case someone mentions something and you're left scratching your head thinking 'Whathefuh?' Um, that's pretty much all I have to say about that. If you already read BTSATS and you're coming over here from there... I love you. =]

DISCLAIMER: Gossip Girl is not mine. Original characters are mine. And Meghan's. But she knows that.

_Now I'm alive and my ghosts are gone, I've shed all the pain I've been holding on__  
__The cure for a heart is to move along, is to move along, so move along__  
__What don't kill a heart only makes it strong_

**Chapter One**_**  
**__The End Where I Begin_

Elle looked from the small, rectangular, leather-bound notebook to the small, rectangular, chrome-plated computer and back.

On the one hand, she was much better with keys and screen than with pen and paper, her patience level and overall attention span were perfectly suited to fast-paced technology, and her new computer was so pretty and shiny and matched her new metallic Christian Louboutins perfectly. On the other, her brother Teddy assured her that the antique method of writing things out longhand would help her sort her thoughts out properly and prevent her from spilling everything out like 'word vomit.' All the great authors did it, or so he and Cedric had said a thousand times over lunch, as though that teeny fact applied to her life at all. She wasn't writing the next great American novel, she was writing a short story; it wasn't even the next great _American_ short story. She was fulfilling a requirement for the AP English Literature course her maman had all but forced Headmistress Queller to transfer her into, in lieu of the utterly useless intermediate French class taught by the sadly inept 'Madam Duvall', that was all.

Her assignment was to write a creative story based on true events from her own life, and Elle had chosen to recount the tale of how she had single-handedly (with very little help from Teddy and none at all from anyone else) reunited her estranged parents, the notorious businessman Charles "Chuck" Bass and the infamous Blair Waldorf. Well, Elle thought with a pleased smile as she plopped down on her plush bed and pulled her computer close to allow better access to its keypad, Blair Waldorf _Bass_ according the newly notarized marriage certificate they'd brought back from Lyon.

It had been a long few months since she'd first come to Manhattan from the only home she had ever known, her native France. Or, at least, she had always believed it to be her native France until her mother's diary along with a few other details had led her on a twisted, topsy-turvy, emotionally draining journey to find her long-lost father. The truth was, she was a Manhattan girl, through and through, and it hadn't taken long for her and everyone else to realize that. Even her new grandmother Lily, a paragon of Upper East Side sophistication and a mainstay at prestigious charity events and the forerunner of many respected society functions, was impressed with how well she had integrated herself into things.

Oui, it was true that she still hadn't gotten used to how _loud_ Americans were, and oui, she refused to break her habit of taking her own coffee mug to the beanery down the street because letting them hand her a disposable to-go cup was much simpler, plus her daddy had bought her a new bicycle to replace the one Saffron Kennedy and her cronies had mercilessly destroyed, which meant her pearly white limo was getting less and less use even in the face of a bitingly cold winter. But all-in-all, the pace suited her much, much better.

Then there was the added bonus of being the newly crowned Queen of Constance Billard. While it had been as good as official before the New Year, the sudden and unexpected resurgence of the internet stalker known as Gossip Girl had pretty much confirmed it. Most of the student population was wary of the site, which up until very recently had been an ancient artifact buried in the archives of internet history and referenced in popular culture only in the book of the same name written by Cedric's dad, Dan.

Who, apparently, preferred to write things out longhand before transposing it to his computer. Elle thought it was a rather pretentious process, to be honest.

But, he had agreed to tutor her in the intricacies of writing in English, thanks to some rather firm nudges from her maman (who maintained she wasn't happy about the fact that 'Brooklyn' was a successful _New York Times_ best seller several times over with multiple major movie deals and even some awards under his belt, but her daughter would get the best even if he was a lower class bridge-and-tunnel rat), so she would keep her lips sealed about that little thought. Peut-être. Unless she forgot and told him so during one of their sessions.

The blank Word document sat just inches from her face, taunting her with the possibilities of where this story could take her. She had recently decided to stop analyzing every detail of her life and picking everything over with such a fine-toothed comb, but this assignment certainly wasn't going to make that goal more achievable. Elle rested her chin on her fist and thought back to everything that had led her to the pale purple bedroom her father had paid exorbitant amounts of money for her to decorate to her liking; exploring the depths of the private library pépé kept at the chateau, finding the Italian leather-bound journal with her maman's thoughts loped all through it, the photograph of her parents young and in love that had fuelled her obsession with Chuck Bass and finding her father, the secrecy, the tears, the heartbreak, the tragedy, the searching, the frustration, the details she'd had to piece together all by herself, her father coming to her rescue at the debutante ball, the sight of her maman's smile breaking prettily across her face like a pale, white dawn as she held her daddy's hand and took back his last name as her own…

It was a lot to write about. But, she had until the end of the semester to do it, so why did she have to start right away? Her eyes lingered again on the worn edges of the journal perched on the corner of her bed, the very same journal she had pulled out from behind another, less important one ten years before. It was a precious item to her, a totem that represented her reality, a memory of the nights spent curled up under soft covers with it pressed beneath her pillow. It and the photograph pasted to her mirror were her constants. They reminded her that everything had not always been as it was, as if she could really forget.

The keys clicked under the pads of her fingers as she tapped them idly, wondering if she shouldn't make something up instead, or tell the story about the time her 'Uncle' Eric and his husband Colin had driven her 8 or so hours from Nice to Paris to crown her a princess in Marie Antoinette's bedroom at the Palace Château de Versailles. She could turn that into some kind of modern fairytale, dress it up with some pretty adjectives and pearly memories of her innocent childhood, and the teacher would undoubtedly eat it up, praise it, call it 'nostalgic' or something. But she didn't particularly want to write about that. It wasn't nearly as interesting, sadly, as two of New York City's most famous residents marrying young, giving birth to twins, splitting up less than a year later, and staying apart until their children were both sixteen.

Chuck and Blair Bass were still the buzz of the city, most particularly because they had cheated society out of an opulent replay of the gorgeous wedding they'd thrown in December of 2010. People were hungry for details as to why, what, _who_ had brought them back together after such a long period of division. And Elle was now even more of a curiosity than she'd been before, when she'd been the little French exchange student with an important last name who bore a striking resemblance to the CEO of Bass Industries; now that the suspicions were more than confirmed, she could barely leave the front door of the Pierre without being hounded by intrigued columnists. Elle Waldorf had been a shiny bauble to admire and coo over, 'oh look at the new girl, how charming to have a Parisian in our school, at our cotillion, in our inner circle'. Elle Bass? She was a different thing entirely. Elle Bass was a phenomenon.

Hence her being cooped up inside on a blinding white Wednesday morning, still in warm pajamas rather than her meticulously crafted school uniform. Everything in her bones wanted to traipse to the school steps and make a grand entrance before the first bell could ring, to call Liese and Cordy on her way and demand they be waiting for her at the front door with a hot croissant and some tea to soothe her throat. Her red velvet double-breasted Rimondi coat was calling to her from the closet – _wear me, wear me, weeeeeeaaaaaaar meeeeeeee_ – and she had a gorgeous pair of distressed leather mid-calf boots that she hadn't found a chance to wear, and it would be so _fun_ to perch in her rightful place and discuss game plans for the weekend, but…

It was too much of a hassle to haul Grant, the former-Secret-Service-agent bodyguard her father employed to look after her and Teddy, everywhere she wanted to go, particularly when the public eye was so very trained on her. Maybe she would be more like her mère and remain aloof to the attention, make appearances only for important functions? But wouldn't that only fuel people's interests? She would just have to wait until the last possible second and have her chauffeur drive her to the front door to minimize exposure. Ugh, her life was _so_ très difficile.

As she was contemplating whether or not to tell her riveting story in a linear fashion, she heard her bedroom door click open and looked up to see her brother sauntering through over to her comfy white lounger without so much as a half-forced attempt at anything resembling knocking.

"Are you actually working on homework right now?" he made himself comfortable, crossing one long leg over the other and folding his hands over his stomach.

"I didn't know you could be physically separated from your girlfriend," Elle bit back from behind her laptop's screen. "Did daddy finally call in the surgeon?"

She gave her hair a tug, wishing it would hurry up and grow so she wouldn't need to add legendary Waldorf curl and volume with expensive and expertly applied extensions. That's when the words popped into her head, full formed and ready to stretch from her fingers to the waiting keys_. I was six years old the first time ma mère allowed me to go into pépé's private library without supervision. I remember tugging nervously on the white ribbons in my hair…_

Before she could get much further, Teddy sighed heavily and interrupted her creative flow. He was such a nuisance, always coming around when she _didn't_ need to talk to him, offering unsolicited advice only when she wanted nothing more than for him to seal his mouth shut with some irreversibly strong adhesive. Sure, she loved him and all that, she was happy to have him in her life, it was a beautiful thing that the two of them were together again and falling into a sort of rhythm with each other that as far as random passers-by were concerned might have taken almost two decades of practice, blah blah blah, but he was her _brother_. This meant that he was inconvenient at all the worst times, helpful only when badgered or unwanted, and forever stealing the last of her favorite foods at breakfast.

"Scarlett had a meeting before school. I'm picking her up for breakfast." He pinched his lips together and stared idly at her ceiling. "Actually, that's what I wanted to talk to you about."

Oh, and he was always pestering her for things.

"Breakfast?" Elle gave up and shut the lid on her laptop and pushed herself up into a sitting position more conducive to conversation. "She will want Au Bon Pain, of course. You are hopeless."

"Merci," was Teddy's dry retort. "I actually wanted to talk to you about something serious, without all the snark. If I wanted to be verbally abused over my morning coffee, I'd ask dad."

Elle rolled her eyes and chose to ignore the obligatory comment about how daddy loved her more, how she was the favorite, how he was so mistreated and unloved and whatever other grievances he was holding inside. If he wanted to air out his boring laundry, he could get a therapist like everyone else and spare her the drivel, because she had a kingdom to run, universities to apply for, her name to put up on marquees all up and down Broadway, and very little time to listen to him whine and mope about the eternal torment that came with being a poor little rich boy with _issues._

"I have not even taken my shower or thought about what I want Dorota to do with my hair, and you are bringing me _serious _conversation?" She crossed her arms over her chest and fixed her twin with a displeased glare that was altogether unimpressive because she had yet to call for her valet to bring her a cup of coffee. But, it was the best she could do on short notice and without having made any strides towards her morning skin care routine. "This is either going to be really juicy or très ennuyeux. You have five minutes."

"I don't know how to date a supermodel."

She bit back a sharp and rather clever remark about how, from what she had accidentally/against her will seen of their rather extensive French kissing sessions, it looked like he was doing a pretty good job, because she heard the tone in his voice. She knew that tone. She used that tone when she was trying to open up about something personal, but didn't want to let the person she was opening up to know just how personal it was. It was true that she was still, in a lot of ways, getting to know her brother, to learn all of his little habits and idiosyncrasies while she tried not to let him drive her insane; she still had a lot to learn as far as the way his mind worked, though she felt like something finite about the way those wheels clicked and turned in his skull had just been revealed. It was something she had suspected, picked up on clearly, refrained from discussing, but which she knew all too well was a huge hindrance to his life.

Their dad was pretty well-known for his youthful career of breaking hearts (and hymens, as their maman had so eloquently joked; daddy had found it incredibly amusing, Teddy and Elle had both simultaneously pressed their palms to their mouths to keep themselves from vomiting all over the limousine's interior), and that was an enormous understatement. He was _legendary_, especially amongst the upperclassmen at St. Jude's School for Boys, for not only the sheer number of women he'd managed to pull in his lifetime, but also for the indisputable quality of those women, an excessive amount of whom had been twins. If a guy managed to score with more than one girl in one night, they called it _pulling a __Chuck Bass_, a fact she and Teddy had alerted him to with looks of disgust and awe (respectively) on their faces. If she could wipe her own memory, Elle would like nothing more than to permanently forget the ensuing conversation as to why that was an insulting and pathetic comparison.

But it was one more piece of evidence that reminded her, showed her, proved to her that as much as Teddy griped and groaned about 'the Bass legacy', he wanted nothing more than to live up to it.

So, she skipped the obvious leap and _also_ bit back the burning question as to why he wasn't going to his father for romantic advice. He didn't want to _need_ to go to his father for romantic advice, he felt like he should just know, and the fact that he didn't was embarrassing. And Bass men weren't supposed to get embarrassed. Sometimes, to herself, privately, in her own head, for no one else to hear, Elle wondered if their daddy hadn't gotten it wrong when he'd sent her to be raised by their maman rather than Teddy. He was more of a Waldorf woman than she'd ever hoped to be.

"I mean, what if she realizes I'm not enough for her?" Teddy continued, completely uninterrupted. Elle honestly didn't know how to reply; it wasn't like she had ever dated a supermodel or had any point of reference as to what list of qualifications they might require a significant other to fulfill. "What if she looks at me one day and thinks to herself, what the hell am I doing with that? I'm beautiful and smart and charming and am also sneaky hot because I don't look like I'd be into comic books but I sort of am, and I can do so much better. What do I do then? Elle, you're not helping me out by just sitting there staring. Give me love advice! You're French; you're supposed to know the answers to these questions."

Elle folded her legs underneath herself and pinched her own lips together in a perfect imitation of his expression. "Actually, I have a dual citizenship now, so I am not strictly-speaking _French_."

"Why do I even bother?" He threw his hands into the air and pushed himself back to his feet. "I come in here seeking wise counsel from a source of female wisdom and I get is _you_. I need a blunt."

"What you need is to calm down," Elle turned her eyes to the heavens in exasperation. And people said she was the dramatic one. _"Theodore_._"_

"Oh, of course," Teddy's eyes narrowed. "_Eleanor_."

"At least people don't call me _Teddy_."

"At least _I_ don't sound like I'm 90!"

"At least _I_ do not sound like a stuffed animal!"

"Can we attempt to focus?" Teddy put his hands behind his back, letting his blazer fall across him in all the right places. His red-and-gold striped tie was done up and knotted very precisely beneath his stark white collar, and his Gucci loafers were a perfect complement to the coat she already knew he would be wearing when they left the hotel. Maybe he didn't see Chuck when he looked in the mirror, the same way it had taken her so many years to finally see Blair, but he was definitely there. "Pretend like you're gonna try to set me up with her again. What would you tell me to do?"

"Remember when we tried that and it turned out you didn't really need my help at all, plus you second-guessed my every suggestion?" The plans for Operation Top Gun were stored in a top secret box of sensitive items, tucked safely underneath her bed with a pair of faded pink ballet slippers. It had been a successful mission in that she had proven to be a very good undercover agent, stalking Scarlett Kennedy and her friend Maverick Sparks in an attempt to discover the nature of their relationship, but Teddy had been tediously unhelpful. Plus, in the end, they had mutually agreed to attend cotillion with each other and everything had been a peachy keen mess of relationship bliss since then, as far as Elle could see. "Shall we travel back to that reality?"

"That was different! I didn't have anything to lose!"

"You _do not_ have anything to lose. Present tense, mon cher frère." Elle sighed, doing the best she could to keep a fond and vaguely amused smile from dominating her expression, and shook her head impatiently. "Trust me, anyone can see elle est amoureuse. Madly, crazily, passionately, whatever word you want to use! It is almost a little sickening, pour être honnête. Now, if only you could stop complaining about how awful your charmed life is, and accept it."

Her eyes landed on the small alarm clock situated on the corner of her vanity and she realized she was far more pressed for time than she had thought. Luckily, Teddy decided to be accommodating _for once_, and leave her to her own devices, a pensive look contorting the angles of his face and pressing his eyebrows almost completely into one thick line of brooding thought. Maybe he had wanted some soothing words about how he was the perfect guy for Scarlett and she would never even consider leaving him for anyone else, maybe he had even just wanted someone to vent to about his feelings. But Elle wasn't much of a _listener_, at least not without also being a _talker_, and besides, if frank honesty and tough love were what it took to get him out of her hair? 'Frank honesty and tough love' would be her new motto.

She might even get it emblazoned on something.

_- xoxo –_

By the time Teddy walked out of his sister's frilly bedroom, down the hall, to the stairs, _down_ the stairs, across the living area that was not really a living area because it was in a constant state of flux depending on how his parents or the interior decorator thought it out to be arranged that day, and into the breakfast nook, he had already decided to disregard everything that had come out of her contrary mouth.

It had been a bad idea to go to her for any kind of _real_ help. Sure, he could count on her if he needed to concoct a half-baked scheme and couldn't quite figure out the best way to make it fail spectacularly, but when something pressing was weighing on his mind and making 8 uninterrupted hours of sleep a physical impossibility, he was better off smoking up, keeping his mouth shut, or seeing if Lex had any interesting insights. That was if he could pry him away from Julian. The two of _them_ were way worse than Elle said he and Scarlett were, constantly holding hands and grinning at each other like complete morons when Teddy was trying to get them to do something constructive. His new video games weren't going to play themselves, after all. It was enough to make him nauseous.

Lux was completely out of the question because she was just a freshman with too much unsupervised access to curling irons and mascara, plus she had gone all _girl power_ on everyone and would very likely tell him he was a misogynist pig because he couldn't think of any reasons for Scarlett to want to stay with him. Cedric was too busy looking at the world through his camera lens to offer any insight past what solution to develop a great black and white photograph in, and apart from them...

He didn't have any other friends.

That made him sound like a complete loser, but it was true. Yeah, there were people at school he talked to, and he went to their parties and smoked their pot and played their games, but he actually kind of loathed every last one of them. They were either _too_ this or _not enough_ that for his liking, whether this or that was ugly, pretty, sociable, funny, talkative, insightful, ambitious, unobservant, high, pessimistic, sarcastic, sweet, or any other adjective that could be conceivably used to describe a human being. Lex said it was because he was too picky, but Teddy knew it was because no one else could get their shit together. Even Elle, his twin sister, wasn't really his friend.

That was to be expected, of course. They had only just met a few months before, and just because they shared DNA, they couldn't exactly be expected to go about life as though they had always been together. When he looked at their parents and how effortless it seemed for them to be together even after all that time, he thought they probably should have been able to; he should have been able to tell when she was being accidentally intelligent and she should have known when it was best to leave him on his own. But it seemed like all they could do was bump and bang into each other at the worst of times, like all the facets of their personalities had attuned, but in discord rather than harmony.

And then, again, there was the matter of their parents.

He caught sight of them through the kitchen door and, like he always did when he stumbled upon them interacting, he stopped dead in his tracks and stared. Like, really stared. Eyes wide and unblinking, mouth a little slack, arms hanging dead from his shoulders, mind put on hold until he could finally comprehend what he was seeing. He couldn't decide if he stared because he was trying to make up for sixteen years worth of witnessing sights like his father's arm wrapped around his mother's waist as she slid her hands to rest on the back of his neck while they spoke to each other in low, private voices, or if he stared because it was all so fucking confusing. Maybe it was a little bit of both. He didn't think it was so insane that he was having a bit of trouble adjusting to the fact that she _wasn't dead_, that she _wasn't Misty Bass_, that the woman he'd spent most of his life believing to be his mother was actually his grandmother, that his dad could smile – smile, not smirk – from ear to ear like that, that _he had a mother and she loved him_.

He'd spent a lot of time in his room after Elle came crashing into his life like a charge from a bazooka, situated in front of his huge TV playing mind-numbing shooting games or watching impressive feats of danger amid colossal explosions as he tried not to contemplate the utter clusterfuck that was his life. As he always did when things got a bit overwhelming, he had created a list, which he often consulted and occasionally added to, to put everything into perspective.

**1. I am Theodore Harold Bass. Everyone calls me Teddy because my godmother, Serena van der Woodsen, made a stupid remark when I was born. Thanks a lot for that.**

Nice, straightforward, no wiggle room for alternate interpretation. Just as he liked his lists to start.

**2. Elle's right, my name is pretty stupid.**

Not that he would ever let her know that he agreed with her about anything. Ever.

**3. I have a twin sister named Elle, by the way. Eleanor Misty Bass. Then Waldorf. Then Bass again. She has more of an accent than she thinks she does, and she's also incredibly annoying. So, from what I can tell from years of watching Lex and Lux duke it out for the remote, she's your average little sister. (I was born first, by over a minute.)**

**4. Her name is also stupid. ****Eleanor****. Also, our names rhyme. It's awful.**

**5. My father is Charles Bass, CEO of Bass Industries. We go to Rangers games and I get to fly to and stay anywhere in the world I want for free.**

**6. My mother is Blair Bass. She is alive, not dead. She is also incredibly intimidating, even more so than dad. Which, I can tell you, is really impressive.**

**7. I am dating Scarlett Kennedy. She is a supermodel. Yeah, Scarlett Rose. I know. ****Fuck.**

**8. I have no idea what I want to do with my life.**

The unspoken number 9 was that he was a total and complete failure. The only reason he hadn't written it down in his notebook was, well, writing it down would pretty much make it irrefutable, and he wasn't willing to accept that he was going to be a total and complete failure _forever_.

Okay, so, he had absolutely no interest in real estate, and he would probably grow up to completely fuck up the legacy his grandfather had built from literally nothing, and he wasn't the top of his class, _and_ he had no idea where he wanted to go to school after he graduated from high school. He slept through assemblies or survived the long lectures because he and Lex liked to get high before school, and up until recently his weekends had either been spent holed up at the Archibalds or on the VIP couch at the burlesque club his dad had given him for his sixteenth birthday. He loathed math, wasn't particularly brilliant in English, and he downright dreaded anything to do with science. Cedric's artistic shit gave him a headache, he'd never done anything to help the homeless or donated fifteen cents a day to starving kids in Africa, and he could count on one hand the number of times he'd sat through a Broadway show without wanting to shoot himself or everyone on stage or both. Sports were completely out of the question; why would he want to run around getting sweaty with a bunch of guys while they chased some ball around a field for two hours? Did anyone seriously think that was a fun way to spend time?

What was he good at?

Halo 9. Lists. Some basic cooking. Not being good at anything. Oh, and reading comic books.

He wasn't even good at being wealthy, because all of the privilege and decadence was totally wasted on him. Or, well, it had been. Until he'd been given something – some_one_ to focus it all on. Scarlett was his dream girl for more reasons than her enormous celebrity, her incredible naturally red hair, pale skin, dusting of freckles, beautiful smile, engaging laugh, unexpectedly dorky personality, and perfect nipples. (Not too big, not scary looking or oddly colored, but pink and the right kind of small. And _incredibly_ sensitive.) Another thing he was good at? Being in love with her. He'd had a lot of practice at it, from afar, in his head, in theory, to himself. She'd kind of been the only girl on his list since freshman year, when she'd transferred to Constance from Chapin, and he wasn't one to settle for less than what he really, really wanted.

And, okay, even though he would also never tell Elle that he was grateful for her existence because she'd had some magical talk with Scarlett one day after cotillion rehearsal, and the next thing he'd known he'd been on the program as her escort, he owed everything to her. It was true. He had been too incapable of coherent speech around her before that to even dream of working up enough resolve to ask her out for a cup of fucking coffee, much less for an elegant night out in front of all New York society. The problem was, and it was exactly why he needed Elle to stop being such a pain in his ass and actually contribute something useful when he needed her help, he didn't know what to do next. He didn't have a damn clue. He'd never been anybody's boyfriend before, not even on the playground in elementary school, and he didn't know anybody who had ever hooked up with a supermodel.

Well, that wasn't exactly true.

But, Teddy could never go to his dad with something like this. The man who could snap his fingers and have every female acrobat in Cirque du Soleil panting for his attention? No chance in hell. He already felt like enough of an idiot when he tried to compare his paltry romantic experience with what his dad had already accomplished when he'd been his age, and now that some bitch claiming to be Gossip Girl was updating the old blog and telling everybody just what a poor match he and Scarlett were...

His dad had never had this problem. No one had ever thought he wasn't good enough for the girl of his dreams. Nobody had ever pegged him as 'a forgettable holiday fling' or started taking bets on how long it would be before his girlfriend kicked him to the curb. The entire city was in love with him, for fuck's sake. He was the former boy billionaire turned respectable businessman, the visionary mogul with more towers than Trump, more bucks than Bloomberg, more everything than anyone else on the planet, who no other man ever could hope to compete with unless he wanted to be crushed under a humiliating pile of inadequacies.

It was different for Teddy. He was _the heir to the Bass fortune_. What did that even mean? 'The heir to the Bass fortune.' The word heir had so many connotations that he didn't even want to think about, but he did. And often. Obsessively. Did people want him to be a carbon copy of his dad? Did he care if they did? Did he care if they knew that he wanted the exact same thing, but no matter how much purple he wore or how many bowties he bought on impulse, he couldn't quite pull it off? Elle could pull of bowties better than he could, and she was a _girl_. He wasn't a huge fan of suits and he didn't think he looked old enough or polished enough to pull them off, especially not pinstripes, and especially not with decorative accents. Also, did they expect him to just sit back and take the load of cash when he took over Bass Industries? They probably wanted him to hire someone to do all the work for him while he smiled charmingly for the cameras and found some equally skinny WASP-y princess to show off on his arm. He didn't have much of a relationship with the board of his dad's company, but he was pretty sure supermodels weren't really viewed as good PR for a future CEO.

No matter how completely wonderful she was, even though she didn't like Wolverine and thought Hal Jordan was an 'all right' Green Lantern. He was willing to overlook those small, minor, practically microscopic faults in favor of the overwhelming positives. And he didn't have any interest in pleasing anyone but himself. That was one thing his father had taught him that he'd stuck to, because it was convenient, but also because it had led to nothing but great things. His dad was remarried to the love of his life, after all, as if any of them could forget. It wasn't like they were constantly making out and sneaking off to 'take a business call' or 'call Dorota about the dry cleaning.'

If Lex and Julian were bad, his mother and father took the cake. He really thought they should have been a little bit more respectful of the fact that they were supposed to be going through a _transition period_ of adjustment and...other psychological mumbo jumbo. Of course, he'd never lived in a house with two parents, and the only notions he had about what it was supposed to be like came from TV and watching Lex's parents interact, but they were getting divorced...a fact no one knew or was supposed to know about, save him, Elle, their parents, and the Humphreys. He had memories of them being really affectionate with each other when he was younger, but all of those observations were from the mind of a disinterested little boy. None of the parents on TV seemed to be all over each other the way his were – shouldn't there be more seething resentment and sexual frustration?

He shook his head and tore his eyes away from the picturesque sight of his mother (she was alive, she was his mother, she wasn't dead, it wasn't his fault, she loved him, she loved him, she loved him) pressing a long kiss to his dad's lips as her right leg popped up, like a scene right out of one of her prehistoric black-and-white films. He'd talk to them about their appalling behavior later, or else get Elle to do it. They were all supposed to go someplace for dinner with grandma and Rufus (he had never called him grandpa and never would, not only because it would remind him for the zillionth time that his grandma's last name was _Humphrey_ of all things, but because Rufus had always tried to make him drink milk at Thanksgiving when he'd still been forced to sit at the kids' table) and Eleanor and Cyrus. Teddy couldn't get used to having two grandmothers. Especially not since Eleanor had always been more of like some random family friend who liked to keep tabs on his school reports and encourage him to take a more active role in charity organizations or whatever it was most fashionable to put on his college applications in order to get into an Ivy.

What he really needed was a vacation. And not a jaunt to Paris in order to Parent Trap his parents back together, but an actual vacation.

Too bad Spring Break was still a few months away. He already had some keen ideas about where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do, most of them involving Scarlett in a bikini.

Scarlett...

Teddy fished his PDA out of his pocket to check the time, but the screen instead flashed that he had an unread message. Who the fuck was texting him at this hour? Scarlett was still stuck in her crack-of-dawn meeting with her agent or her agency or whichever she'd said she was supposed to be meeting with, if Elle had any more useless remarks to make about his love life, she'd yell them down the stairs to him rather than waste time typing out a message, and Lex was undoubtedly still buried under his covers pretending it was 4 AM and that he had hours and hours before he needed to wake up.

Intrigued, he clicked the enter button and let it take him to his inbox, but the message he saw wasn't from a classmate or even from Dorota, asking about any errands she might need him to run while he was shut up in school until 3. He wished no one had ever told him about the mysterious new updates on Gossip Girl, because ever since he'd gone to check and see what all the fuss was about, he'd been getting _nothing but alerts_ straight from a blocked number, and they always led to some new posting about a raging party or some speculation about who was dating whom and why and what drugs were probably involved.

This one, though, was different. A lot different. For one, the people pictured were his godfather, Nate, and a familiar mop of blonde hair that could only belong to 'Aunt' Jenny. It was cropped together like in a tabloid magazine by the cash register at Dean & Deluca. Nate looked older than usual, exhausted and even a little miserable as he walked across what looked like the sidewalk in front of The Palace; right next to him, divided by a slanted white border, was his soon-to-be ex-wife exiting the headquarters of her fashion line, her hair pulled back into a sloppy bun, enormous sunglasses covering the majority of her face but unable to hide the grim frown tugging at the edges of her small mouth. Its headline read **TOO BLONDE TO FUNCTION** and, from what he skimmed of the snappy article, went on to reveal very intimate details about the divorce proceedings.

The divorce proceedings.

The divorce proceedings that no one was supposed to know about.

Fuck.

He really hoped Lex _was_ still hiding from reality, because Teddy was definitely not equipped to handle any drama that wasn't his own. Not so early in the day that he hadn't yet so much as passed an open Starbucks. What would he say if Lex called him in three minutes demanding to know what the hell was going on? 'Sorry everyone knows every detail of your emotionally draining family problems. Want to roll a joint?'

And then there was the even more pressing question.

If no one was supposed to know, how had Gossip Girl found out? More to the point, _who had told her_?


End file.
